An Unspoken Urban Drama

February 1, 2008

Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz is helped quite a bit if the reader knows something about the Egyptian urban landscape of the 1940s. Concentrating on the life of a narrow alley, Mahfouz never steps back to clarify and explain the larger world his characters inhabit. One reason for this may be that he was at this point writing for a local Egyptian audience which needed no cues about how Cairo worked.

From the 1870s through the 1940s Cairo was a city split in two: a traditional city and a modern city. Looking back on that time Alaa Al Aswany, author of the Yacoubian Building, limns the nature of this modern Cairo:

Downtown remained, for at least a hundred years, the commercial and social center of Cairo, where the biggest banks, the foreign companies, the stores, the clinics and the offices of famous doctors and lawyers, the cinemas, and the luxury restaurants. Egypt's former elite had built the downtown area to be Cairo's European quarter, to the degree that you would find streets that looked the same as those to be found in any of the capitals of Europe... It was considered quite inappropriate for natives to wander around in Downtown in their gallabiyas and impossible for them to be allowed in this same traditional dress into restaurants such as Groppi's... [32]

It is hard for Americans to get their minds around the colonial urban experience. Imagine if some foreign nation took over the US and looked down terribly on our way of life. They set up shiny new "modern" cities just outside our own cities.. and then disallowed Americans from entering these new cities in their normal clothes! The restaurants and cinemas would come to reflect a foreign taste.. as would the high end stores. We in the US have bouts of xenophobia when some foreign country buys up one of our corporations.. so I can only imagine how we would respond to colonization.

But strange as it may seen, this was the reality Egyptians lived with. This is what one must understand when reading Midaq Alley. The alley—located near the mosque of Hussein in the heart of the traditional city—is portrayed as a place that has lived through multiple historical dynasties and will continue after the present turbulence. Through the course of the novel the alley acquires a chain of symbolic meanings: the alley=Islam=contentment=sleep. It is a world that to some degree reflects traditional Islamic values.

When poor Hamida follows her ambitious and covetous heart and runs away, she finds herself in a very different place. It is the modern city.. the colonial city.. where a different set of values are adhered to. Here is Mahfouz's description of the transition from traditional to modern city:

The streetlamps were lit, and traffic flowed on, indifferent to the change from day to night. The whole surface of the earth seemed to echo and resound with ceaseless noise. Streetcars rumbled by, auto horns blew, vendors shouted their wares, and street musicians blew their pipes, while people bustled all around. Coming in from the alley to this street was like a translation from sleep to noisy wakefulness. [279-80]

This quick portrait of the modern city goes some way to clarifying the second chain of symbolic meanings: modern city=Europe=ambition/desire=wakefulness.

Part of what is hidden in the novel is that we are not talking here about a transition from a residential to a shopping district.. or from the suburbs to the city center. Those are our own familiar urban transitions. But in Midaq Alley we see reflected a much more tightly defined transition that occurred over the course of really a very small area. These two distinct sections of the city then are taken up into the weave of associations and assigned meaning.

It is possible to read Midaq Alley as a drama of the urban landscape. The characters in this reading are most important for the way they embody responses to these sections of the city. There is the call to contentment in the alley and the siren call of desire emanating from the modern city. But to understand this urban drama the American reader must forget about what he/she knows about cities and imagine life in this dualistic colonial construction.